Guys - I'm about to start on a job that will need a controlled 'pinching and tearing' effect. Effectively I'll be creating an organic protrusion growing out of a surface. The protrusion will then have a noose placed around it, which will tighten around the base - and then rip it off the surrounding surface... ouch...

So basically a soft-body / collider set up for he noose - but I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on whether the new X-Particles 4 cloth or standard C4D cloth would offer the most control?

If you just want to rip appart a simple piece of table cloth, both work and AFAIK both support a vertex tear map.

But I found clothilde simple to setup but very hard to control when trying to do non-saggy clothing on a character for instance.

XP gives you more control, but needs more steps to set up.

I finally decided to bake a simulation in Marvelous designer (which is much better in every aspect... except that it doesn't do tearing at all, and costs more obviously)

What you describe doesn't seem too complicated, so I'd try C4D cloth first (quicker to setup) : You'll quickly see if it fails miserably or not, and that'll leave you plenty of time to explore the other options.

Thanks guys - really appreciate the insight. Most of my work is hard surface stuff - and I'm currently a visualize user : ( This particular job is tipping me over the edge into coughing up for XP or Studio. Can't justify both at the moment, so just wanted to make sure I was heading in the right direction.

One other option is just to avoid sims altogether and fake it, with sculpts, morphs and judicious use of After Effects. I find simulations always look great but take so much time to get right. You could just model some pose morph and wrangle it in post. Doing a single shot 'in-camera' is almost always not the way to do it!

TBH - that was exactly my initial thought.
I've been playing around with cloth and dynamics this afternoon and clearly they're powerful tools - but, yes : by the time I've got to grips with them and refined the sim I could have probably boxed modelled it twice over... Ah the tyranny of choice...
And, yes - and bit of carefull work in Ae / Premiere can go a long way ; )

If its just for stills then id combine the use of C4D own simulation with some sculpting to clean i it up a bit if its simple cloth. If its for character then Id just go with Marvelous Designer and be done with it.

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